“What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the faces of the poor into the dirt?” - Isaiah 3:15
On the one hand, death by cancer was nothing new. Like so many families with migrant farm labor in their immediate past, varieties of cancers seemed to bloom undetected and unchecked until it was far too late. Some of my fondest memories from childhood are the result of long car rides from our home outside San Antonio, TX to the tiny East Texas town of Rosebud -- population less than 2,000 -- where I played wildly with my siblings and cousins outside as my parents, aunts and uncles mourned distant relatives indoors. My experiences of those trips involved climbing trees, running from cows, tasting honeysuckle, and steeling myself for the eventual moment when I’d have to kneel and kiss my deceased relative on the forehead. My grandfather’s death, however, was the first time death-by-cancer had touched someone I knew closely, a person I loved and admired deeply.
My maternal grandparents, Eusebio and Cruz Castilleja, immigrated from Monterrey, Mexico in 1954 and settled in San Antonio’s West Side in a small home on Delgado Street. Each summer, they’d pack up their six children, including my mother, for a long drive from San Antonio to family farms outside of Krakow, Wisconsin to work as migrant farm laborers. My father’s family had a similar pattern, although he remembers spending summers picking cotton outside of Houston, TX. Decades later, during a road trip to Galveston beach, my dad pulled the car over by the side of a cotton field so we could see what it felt like to extract the pillowy fibers from the razor-like leaves. My siblings and I held on to our cotton through the rest of the trip.
The experiences and humiliations of those fields ended up as the seeds for the stories I’d grow up hearing around family dinner tables. Long after my parents, aunts and uncles had moved on to office jobs and various professions, family gatherings included unbearably long story-telling sessions -- usually led by an uncle - about what had taken place during those critical years. My family was lucky in that we had been able to leave the fields behind within a generation. And though there were family members who didn’t wish to dwell on that past, the stories would flood out whenever there was a funeral -- and there were many funerals to go to.
On one of the long car trips back from Rosebud, I recall my parents talking about why so many people in our family were dying from cancer. They had just overheard other family members -- perhaps distant cousins or an aunt twice removed -- talking about the connection between the cancers and the pesticides they were exposed to in the fields. My father recalled crop dusters dropping pesticides directly on them as they worked below. Like poisonous snow, I remember thinking. Part of why I remember that conversation so distinctly is that it led me to worry, in my own childish way, about whether that poison could be transmitted from skin to skin and from generation to generation. Was the poison eating away at me already?
In 1996 - the same year of my grandfather’s death - a study on the prevalence and cultural attitudes toward cancer among migrant farmworkers affirmed much of what my parents were discussing in that car ride back from Rosebud. Reading over that study’s findings over the past week has been a little like returning to the funeral receptions of my childhood. After affirming that seasonal and migrant workers are at elevated risk for lymphomas and prostate, brain, leukemia, cervix, and stomach cancers, the study describes the way cancers are understood and described among impacted families. “In regard to cancer, an intense fear of the disease coupled with fatalism regarding its treatment and course were found to be pervasive among the migrant workers who participated in the focus groups. Cancer was nearly synonymous with death - an association that likely reflected the experience that migrant workers have had with cancer.” The economic drivers behind this exposure to pesticides were also examined. When asked why a participant had continued to work in the fields when he knew the risks of exposure to pesticides, he responded: "If I refuse to go into the field, there are many others who would be happy to do it so their families could eat."[1]
Sitting in my grandparents’ home as my grandfather lay dying, different strands that I had intuited about the way the world worked were coming together. His cancer was a striking lesson in the intertwined nature of poverty and vulnerability to disease. Poisonous snow had fallen from the sky onto the skin of my grandfather and closest relatives. Who flew the plane and what were they thinking? Did they know what would eventually happen to the people below? An understanding of the universe as an ultimately cold and cruel place closed in. But then, my depressed daydreaming was interrupted by the sudden presence of a priest.
What I recall is there was a knock, a hubbub among my aunts, and then suddenly there was a Roman Catholic priest in my grandparents’ house, a holy outsider in my family’s deepest moment of mourning. He was quickly escorted from the front door to my grandfather’s bedroom where he performed the Last Rites.
Being something of a veteran of Roman Catholic funerals, I’d certainly seen priests and understood at a basic level why one had just knocked on the door. But at fourteen, I found myself asking a deeper set of questions that I’m still reflecting on today. Why, really, had a priest suddenly shown up? What did my Mexican grandparents’ faith have to say about the full scope of what was happening? And why was it that the church was one of the only institutions that appeared to care about the dignity of my dying grandfather?
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A year or so later, I was riding my bike through the quiet country roads surrounding my family’s home in the Texas Hill Country. As a result of seeing the priest walk through the doorway of my grandparent’s home, I’d begun a slow, careful reading of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, one that involved copying out by hand significant chunks of the Gospels per day to absorb the text more fully. I’d recently come across the Magnificat in the Gospel of Luke and - strange teenager that I was - had decided to commit it to memory. As a result, particular lines kept floating to mind as I rode my bike up and down the gentle slopes that early evening. “My soul magnifies the Lord…” “He has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of humble estate” “He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty...”
These lines were unlike any version of Christianity that I’d experienced up to that point. The small Texas town I grew up in was thoroughly controlled by aggressively white, Christian fundamentalists. A pointedly politized version of this movement was growing in strength and force across the country throughout the 1990s, something which I saw first-hand as I watched friends disappear into homeschooling, or become transformed from decent and funny kids into radical evangelists who wished to ban books from the library.
By the time I graduated from the local, public high school, Christian students had staged walkouts of Biology II when evolution was taught; an English teacher was fired for teaching the novel Snow Falling on Cedars because it had a scene of interracial sex and discussed Japanese internment camps; our principal had led the school in the Lord’s Prayer before football games with impunity; and motivational speakers had been regularly brought in to exhort us to follow Jesus lest we burn in hell. Middle school and high school were times of Young Life rallies and morning gatherings of angry blond teenagers for prayer around the flagpole -- all of which I was thankfully excluded from on account of being Latino, nerdy, and very gay. Yet I watched closely as this version of Christianity created holy cover for a terrorizing cruelty toward those on the margins, and it is impossible to briefly describe how much work it has taken to undo the fear, shame, and self-hatred that I internalized from those years. My primary experience of Christianity, therefore, had been this soul-crushing expression of white, fundamentalist conservatism, with cruel so-called Christians serving to mock and self police anyone deviating from this norm.
Because of this, it felt - in fact, it oftentimes still feels - like a betrayal to open the Bible, a text that is so thoroughly owned by those who are committed to terrorizing the lives of LGBTQ communities and people of color. And yet my curiosity ultimately got the better of me. What did the text actually say? How did this same text galvanize both the white evangelical movement that I actively feared, as well as lead a Roman Catholic priest to show up to honor the dignity of my grandfather at his deathbed? I was - and remain - fascinated by this dissonance.
What I discovered in my furtive reading of the Gospels was a world of agricultural images and miraculous stories that was a great deal more like the world described around my immigrant grandparents’ kitchen table than the bleached blonde Christianity I was encountering in school. These were stories about day laborers and outcasts, people who were desperately sick seeking a miraculous cure; there were stories of people who were hungry, had been robbed, or were begging on the side of the road, as well as stories of people who had been humiliated and then lifted up. While this wasn’t clear to me at the time, I now realize that what I was picking up on was one of the peculiarities of the Gospels themselves. In Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, historian Diarmaid McCullough notes, “Biographies were not rare in the ancient world and the Gospels do have many features in common with non-Christian examples. Yet these Christian books are an unusually ‘down-market’ variety of biography, in which ordinary people reflect on their experience of Jesus, where the powerful and the beautiful generally stay on the sidelines of the story, and where it is often the poor, the ill-educated and the disreputable whose encounters with God are most vividly described.”[2] The Gospels are peculiarly and pointedly about the lives of the poor.
Further, in addition to these stories being about “the poor, the ill-educated and the disreputable”, they also gave expression to something I’d not yet had words for: a profound longing for the world to be turned upside down. In Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, for example, not only does Jesus say that it is the poor, the hungry, those who are weeping, and those who are hated who are blessed in God’s Kingdom. Jesus then proceeds to pronounce woes on the rich, the well-fed, those who are laughing now, and the currently adulated.
Reading those words, my teenage soul joined up with generations of people who have found strength and courage in both halves of Luke’s Beatitudes, both the positive affirmations of the poor as blessed as well as the less frequently cited pronouncement of woes on the “powerful and beautiful people” who made the lives of the poor miserable. God’s anger flashes throughout the Old and New Testaments like lightning bolts on a hot Texas summer afternoon, and very often this anger is directed at the way the poor are being humiliated and mistreated. “What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the faces of the poor into the dirt?” God asks in the Book of Isaiah.[3] What do we mean by this, indeed? It was a literal revelation to realize as a teenager that my sorrow and yes, anger, at the way the world was ordered might somehow be connected to God’s desire for justice.
Of course, what I didn’t realize then - and what I see much more clearly now - is that it is very often the Church itself that is deeply uncomfortable with and resistant to the visions of justice and reversal within the Gospels. Jesus’ beatitudes affirm that the poor are blessed, but the third century theologian Clement of Alexandria proclaimed poverty to be an internalized, spiritual state achievable by the very rich. Jesus would tell the rich young ruler to give away all his possessions to the poor, but a counter-tradition of wealth stewardship would ultimately encourage the wealthy to retain their riches, provided they offer a significant percentage to the building up of the Church. Today, the Episcopal Church - a tradition I joined in my twenties - is more well known for being the denomination of the wealthy elite rather than for its concern for the poor. While it’s progressive on many matters, it has developed a relationship toward wealth and the wealthy that is bizarre and unabashedly obsequious.
In many respects, this project is about unpacking that strange relationship. How is it that we have arrived here? What happened along the way to make such a position possible? While there are various theological canards that insist that Anglican faith has nothing to do with caring about poverty -- one of the most often being pitting the transcendent against the prophetic -- it would seem the biblical text themselves resist this.
What does one do with the Magnificat, for instance? This centerpiece of Anglican spirituality includes a description of God’s inbreaking that celebrates societal reversal, filling the hungry with good things and a sending of the rich away empty. Where does one file that troublesome 58th chapter in Isaiah? Recited each Ash Wednesday, God explicitly connects true worship to the loosening of the bonds of injustice, the breaking of every yoke, with the sharing of bread, and housing of the homeless. What to make of the Book of Revelation, a text that famously employs transcendent imagery to portend the downfall of the oppressive Roman Empire? A periodic walk through the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, whose chaotically beautiful imagery is inspired by the writer of the Book of Revelation, suggests that the transcendent, prophetic, and apocalyptic ultimately buttress one another, culminating in a complex spirituality that embraces both the transcendent and prophetic traditions.
There is, in fact, a profound and deeply-rooted, Christian counter-tradition for whom a transcendent longing for God is inexorably connected to the desire for God’s justice for the poor in the here and now. As the son and grandson of seasonal migrant farmworkers, and having watched time and time again how the faces of America’s poor are ground into the dirt, I am invested in encouraging the Episcopal Church to step away from its well-established, bizarrely obsequious relationship to wealth. My sense is that any attempt to do so will need to be ultimately grounded in tradition, especially the first five hundred years or so of Christianity’s development, and so that is the scope and nature of this project. I am hopeful that the spirit of my Papá will bless me in this endeavor.
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[1] “Peer Discussions of Cancer Among Hispanic Migrant Farm Workers” Paula M. Lantz, Laurence Dupuis, Douglas Reding, Michelle Krauska and Karen Lappe, Public Health Reports (1974-)
Vol. 109, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 1994), pp. 512-520.
[2] MacCullough, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Page 77.
[3] Isaiah 3:15
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